


truth by my bedside, heaven in the air

by GodmotherToClarion



Category: Free!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Artist Nanase Haruka, Coma, Fae & Fairies, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Happy Ending, Magic, Major Character Injury, Nymphs & Dryads, air sprite Rei, dryad prince Makoto, how do all these tags go together?, makoto is a physiotherapist, nagisa is a nurse, read and find out, rei is a doctor, sun spirit Nagisa
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-27 06:46:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16213628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GodmotherToClarion/pseuds/GodmotherToClarion
Summary: Alone in the belly of a Tokyo hospital, an artist begins to dream.





	truth by my bedside, heaven in the air

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! I know I should *really* be working on my other series (which I am!) but since the 2018 Flash Bang is coming up I thought I'd post a prequel to that piece<3 Enjoy!! :3

**_Tokyo Ambulance Service_ **

There have been too many poor souls brought to him like this, he thinks. 

The boy―many years younger than Rei, not more than twenty-three at oldest―has long dark hair plastered close to his cheeks with blood, and for a moment he cannot tell where the worst of it is coming from. 

**_Event Number: 9614_ **

Three others arrive in the white vans behind him. A man and a woman, the boy’s parents, and his grandmother. 

All three pronounced dead on arrival.

**_Delay Classification: DI, WE_ **

_ Extended distance to incident and adverse weather conditions have resulted in a 34-minute delay.  _

Perhaps the grandmother would have lived if not for the snow, says Nagisa. He puts a hand on Rei’s shoulder before leaving to make his rounds, and after scanning the report the doctor begins his work. 

**_Patient’s Details_ **

_ Name: Unknown.  _

Once the boy has been stabilized they find a broken driver’s license, emblazoned with the name  _ Nanase Haruka.  _

***** ***** *****

By sunrise Rei and Nagisa are nearly dead on their feet, ending their weekly ten-hour shift with breakfast in the staff canteen. Both of them are freshly bathed, though they take their showers at home more often than not; as part of the emergency ward, Rei and Nagisa have seen their share of cases like Nanase Haruka’s, but by whatever mercy there is they do not see them often. Before their departure they have their patient moved to the intensive care unit, where he will come into their care again the following Tuesday. 

At their little flat Rei disappears into his bedroom at once, leaving Nagisa alone in the kitchen to nurse a mug of tea. Mornings like this are the worst of his line of work, and as he sits gazing into his cup he thinks of the ICU, of the handful of children confined in the pediatric division―and now of the boy whose accident had stripped him of his family, the boy to whom Nagisa had already given the name  _ Haru-chan.  _ He recalls the paramedics’ report with a shiver and downs his tea at a mouthful, eager to chase the chill from his heart before it could take him wholly. 

For Nanase Haruka might not live to see them, as badly hurt as he is―and though Nagisa has worked in the high-risk wing for the past four years and a half, the ache of watching a patient die never grows easier to bear. 

* * *

It is some time before he remembers the evening that brought him to the Heights, as he has decided to call them: some time in his thought at least, for trapped in the floating mist as he is he cannot tell how long might have passed in the world beyond. Somehow he knows that his body still clings to breath, just as he knows that his grandmother and his parents have passed beyond his reach. If he were dead he would have found all three of them long ago, and trapped as he is on the treacherous cliff he must have remained alive.  _ Poor Father _ , he thinks, tracing the kiss of a gust of fog upon his pallid cheek. He recalls the crash only faintly, not by design but by the sheer force of the window striking his skull―but he still he is certain that the tanker hit them head-on, and that he too ought to have perished in the blinding pain that followed. 

When he does remember he leaves the point of chill grey stone and walks, slipping through the fissures and gullies in the rock wherever he finds a turning, passing like a ghost between the bluffs without a glimpse of open sky to break the gloom. Neither thirst nor hunger touch him at all in the silence, and so he wanders on for many days without keeping mind of where he roams, or how far. 

After what he guesses must be a month in the Heights alone, he wakes to a beam of pale-red light piercing the heavy fog, and famished as he is for air and sun he flings himself through the ravine, running barefoot over jagged granite until he stumbles past an archway and into a greening meadow. As his toes make purchase upon the grass the Heights melt away behind him, leaving him breathless in the midst of a patch of white and golden flowers. 

“Thank the Goddess,” comes a gentle voice, and then a soft hand at his shoulder. “We have waited nearly two moons in the Plain for you, Haruka.”

For a moment he gapes in frightened wonder, scarcely a breath from weeping at the sight of the boy before him: a living boy, as living and hale as he could wish in the flush of a fevered dream, tall and slender and dressed in silks that shroud his body in blue. From his back a pair of clear-glass wings fall to the ground below, glinting in the light like the spectacles upon his angled face. 

“You were the one who kept me breathing after the accident,” Haru murmurs. “A paramedic, then?”

“A doctor,” the young man corrects, lifting his spectacles up to the bridge of his nose. “But your parents and your grandmother, Haruka, they―”

“I know,” he replies, sinking onto the dew-damp grass to sit with his chin by his knees. “I’ve been here for nearly a month, and I was alone from the first.”

“I am sorry,” says the doctor, patting Haru’s elbow. 

The words are kindly and honestly spoken, and for a while the two boys sit together to watch the waxing twilight. When the last ray of scarlet fades below the horizon the newcomer rises to his feet, brushing the hem of his purple tunic as he glances up at the moon. 

“Are you going?” cries Haru, catching a slender hand in his to keep its master from departing. “You need not leave me already―”

“I am with you now outside, Haru,” soothes his companion. “I must go for the night, but you will be safe until morning, and then I shall return. I swear it.”

With that he wraps a shawl round his shoulders and flies up into the evening, straight and true as a swallow without stirring his shining wings. Before he vanishes into the mist Haru calls out at the top of his lungs, cupping his fingers round his mouth until the doctor turns back to listen. 

“What shall I call you?”

“Beauty,” laughs the sylph, filling the meadow with a breath of song like wind through a string of bells. “I am called Beauty, for I seek it wherever I go.”

* * *

The next night Beauty comes back again, accompanied by a lively sprite with hair as golden as sun-warmed honey and eyes like a restless colt’s: forever eager for some scheme or other, but still as clear and guileless as a baby’s. The boy is perhaps two or three years younger to his friend the sylph, and the moment he and Beauty alight in the field together he runs to fling his arms round Haru’s neck. 

“Haru-chan!” he shouts, knocking the artist flat on his back and into a ring of cornflowers. “You’re well, you’re  _ well _ ―”

“Am I?” asks Haru, greatly surprised. “I never woke once since the accident, or at least I don’t think I did.”

“No, but you have grown stronger,” smiles Beauty, catching his charge by the scruff of his neck and tugging Haru free. “The ribs on your right side were broken, but by the time you wake I doubt they will trouble you at all.”

“Thank you, Beauty,” says Haru, bowing his head to the sylph. “And who are you?”

“Rei-chan’s nurse, and yours,” sings the second faerie, filling his lap with daisies until he looks half-buried beneath a drift of snow. “You’re closer to waking when he speaks, but after I spent the morning teasing him in your room I thought for a moment you would get up and scold us both.”

“That was  _ you?  _ I felt as cross as a bear an hour ago, and there was nothing here to trouble me at all.”

At that Beauty and his companion spring up from the grass and rise to dance together, shrieking like a pair of children at Haru’s bewildered frown until he takes to the air beside them. 

* * *

Before the evening’s end he learns the young sprite’s name, and like Beauty’s it fits him like a glove; he calls himself the Golden One, for the long yellow curls that hang down his back and the sun-coloured sparks that bloom from the soil where he treads. Haru and Beauty laugh in his presence as neither has done for weeks, and when the first tinge of crimson shows its face in the darkness the Golden One takes Beauty’s hands and bears him away through the mist. But before they flee they give Haru their oath to return, and so having set him at peace they vanish into the skies. 

It goes on so for night after night, and at length the three friends forget that one of them lies still as the grave in the belly of a Tokyo hospital. For they  _ are  _ friends now, and beloved to Haru as none of his childhood playmates had been; he listens for Beauty’s voice the moment the heavens grow dim, and sits as still as an idol until the sylph and sprite stand together in the fragrant meadow beside him. Now and again they spend their nights lying side-by-side on a plain of violet and yellow, blinking up at the wheeling stars until they fall into slumber―but Beauty does not sleep, for as Haru lies dreaming with the Golden One’s head on his arm the sylph plucks Orion’s belt from the blue and fashions it into a diadem to sit on his shapely brow. The little Bear becomes a girdle for the Golden One, and from the  _ Argo’s  _ keel he crafts a pair of quivering anklets to adorn the sprite as he dances. For Haru he makes a garland to hang upon his breast, wrought from the fire in the Scorpion’s tail and the three stars across its head, and when the string of heavenly gems circles his throat the young man laughs like a child at the sheen they leave on his flesh. 

“Bid farewell to the meadow tonight,” the Golden One tells him one evening, plucking the Archer’s bow from his hair and casting it back to its keeper. “Tomorrow we go to the Green, and we shall remain there until you are woken.”

“The Green?” asks Haru, brushing Atlas and Bellatrix out from between his fingers. “Where is that?”

“I could not tell you, surely,” laughs the Golden One. “All of this, Haruka―the Heights, the Meadows, and even Beauty and I―we are wholly of your making, and thus the Green will belong to you. Do you know what you wish of it yet?”

“No, not yet,” he admits. Somehow he knows that the Green still lies unmade; the Heights were begotten for Haru alone, and the Meadow was born for the Golden One to frolic with Beauty in the twilight. Though seven weeks have come and gone since their meeting nothing about them has changed, and so he comes to realize that the soul that rules the Green has not yet crossed his path. 

* * *

“Good morning, Makoto,” comes a harried voice, followed by a head of dark hair peering out of the second ward in the intensive care unit. “He’s ready for you now.”

The therapist gives him a cheerful grin and follows the doctor into the room, taking in the sight of four beds side by side down the left wall of the ward. All of them are empty save the one beside the window, and pushing his cart before him Makoto bends to peer at his patient’s face. It had been suntanned once, he thinks, for his pallor is only the pallor of week after week spent indoors; beneath the white cheeks the blood runs quick and strong, lending a flush of red to the young man’s lips under the clear plastic mask. As ever he marvels that the boy before him is alive, kept from death by the very skin of his teeth; he is expected to make a full recovery in time, according to Rei’s report, and shaking himself from his thoughts Makoto draws back the blankets and bares his patient’s limbs to the light. They are scarcely more than bone, wasted by the month he has spent unconscious―but it is Makoto’s task to mend that, and after cleaning the gangling arms and legs with an alcohol wash he sets up the NMES apparatus and fixes the gel-filled pads along the outer length of the young man’s thighs, above the long muscle running down to his knee _.  _ Once the electrodes are in place he turns on the machine, delivering a jolt of current through the long-silent sinews to bring them back to life. 

Two hours later Makoto pulls the last electrode free from his patient’s shoulder, calling softly to Nagisa to wipe the jelly from his skin. The day had been a slow one, as Wednesdays always are, and he is relieved to unclasp the wires from their pads and tuck the NMES away. He bids goodnight to Rei before taking his leave from the ward, wincing at the sound of a sudden cry breaking upon his ear. 

“Mako-chan!” calls Nagisa, motioning him back. “You’re off your shift now, aren’t you? When do you come on call again?”

“Tomorrow at noon,” says Makoto, bemused. “Do you want me to bring you cake from the canteen before that?”

“No, no,” sings the nurse, taking his hand and urging him forward to stand by the bed at the window. “You have to talk to him, Mako-chan!”

“To Nanase-san?” asks the therapist. “Why?”

“Well, he hasn’t got anyone to visit him,” sighs Nagisa. “You know about the accident, don’t you? His parents and his grandmother were all the family he had, according to his records, and all three of them died in the crash. He’s a graduate student at Hidaka, so we thought some friends might come, but nobody has. He doesn’t exactly respond when Rei-chan and I talk to him, but his heart monitor fluctuates a little at our voices.”

“So he can hear you,” Makoto realizes. “What about the rest of the staff? Does he respond to him?”

“The rest are on rotation,” shrugs the younger man. “Rei-chan and I are the only ones here permanently, since we requested a transfer from emergency last month. I think Haru-chan responds because he recognizes us, and since you’re going to be treating him until he’s taken out of coma―”

“Brilliant,” praises the therapist, smiling softly at the happy flush that steals over Nagisa’s face. “How do you two do it, then?”

“I sit beside him and hold his hand,” comes the reply. “Rei-chan usually talks to him in passing, wishing him good night and good morning and telling him not to be afraid when we leave. But sometimes we talk to each other so that Haru-chan can hear us, and once when I started teasing Rei Haru-chan almost looked cross.”

“All right,” laughs Makoto, sinking down onto a chair and folding Haruka’s cool hands between his. For a moment he halts at their touch, patting the writer’s callus on the thin middle finger with his thumb: it is larger than the matching lump on his own right hand, raised by angled brushes instead of a wooden pencil. Nagisa sees him stop and nods, setting a palm on Makoto’s shoulder as he sits on the far side of the bed. 

“It’s always the hands that do it,” he murmurs. “I always thought it would be their faces, but when they’re all still and quiet like this their faces all look the same. But the hands keep him human, somehow.”

With that he turns and goes to join Rei in the next room, leaving Makoto alone with Nanase Haruka. For a minute the therapist wonders what he ought to say, to make himself known to a crash victim who has not moved for weeks―but then he hears twin strains of high-pitched laughter, followed by the warmth of twenty small fingers fluttering down his sides. The thought of the children is enough to calm him, and after asking Nagisa for a water bottle he tells his silent companion about his little brother and sister. He talks until his throat is rough and the bottle completely emptied, and only then does he get up and bid his patient farewell.

**Author's Note:**

> a belated thank you to schnooglepuffs for the info about emergency reports!


End file.
